THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: German fury at paying for Greek extravagence is turning into anger against the European Union, the euro, and Angela Merkel, writes Andrew Gilligan in Westphalia.
Unlike the lily-livered British red-tops, the main German tabloid, Bild Zeitung, puts nipples on the front page. Day after day for the past week, it has been metaphorically stripping naked the same victim, then pouring cold baked beans over her head. Once-divorced mother-of-none Angela Merkel, 55, from Berlin, a chancellor of Germany, has had probably the worst seven days of her life.
To imagine the full scale of Mrs Merkel's disaster, think of it as a bit like that moment in 2008 when Britain suddenly had to find £46 billion of public money to bail out the banks, overnight storing up years of spending cuts, tax rises and general misery for everyone else. Then multiply the amount of money potentially required, and the amount of pain which could be inflicted, by three.
Mix in the fact that the people the German government has had to rescue aren't even Germans, but Greeks. Add that the deal was done only after the repeated prodding by Mrs Merkel's great European rival, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who reportedly threatened to pull out of the euro. Then there was the problem that as all this was unfolding, Mrs Merkel had to face a vital election.
And top off with the slowly-dawning, horrified realisation by the taxpayers of Germany that late last Sunday night, their Chancellor signed them up for potentially even bigger, indeed unlimited, bailouts of everyone else in the single currency, too.
"We are again the idiots of Europe!" shrieked Bild, which has the power of the Daily Mail, The Sun, and the Daily Mirror added together, and whose official slogan can be broadly translated as "We think up your opinions so you don't have to." Even before Sunday night, things had been going downhill for the world's most powerful woman. Last Saturday, Mrs Merkel held an open-air rally in the industrial city of Bielefeld. Intended to rouse her party supporters on the eve of the crucial poll, it turned into something of a rout. >>> Andrew Gilligan in Bielefeld, Westphalia | Sunday, May 16, 2010
